Roman Rosdolsky, Engels and the ‘Nonhistoric’ Peoples: the National Question in the Revolution of 1848

The extraordinary work that follows was written by the Ukrainian Marxist Roman Rosdolsky (1898-1967) in the spring of 1948, in the centennial year of the revolution with which it is concerned. In spite of the timeliness of its composition, Rosdolsky's monograph could not find a publisher immediately. This was partly due to the postwar chaos and the author's circumstances. Rosdolsky had only recently come to America,where he settled in Detroit, and he wrote his monograph in German. His connections with the new Europe were still very tenuous, and with some connections, being a former Communist in Cold-War America, he had to be quite circumspect in order to avoid deportation. Given, furthermore, the general isolating effect of his very modest means, it is understandable that almost anything Rosdolsky might have written in this period, regardless of topic, would have had difficulties in finding a publisher.However, this book in particular posed a problem. It concerned some embarassing statements made by Marx and, above all, Engels with regard to East European peoples. During the revolution of 1848-49 Marx and Engels had characterized most of the Slavic peoples (the outstanding exception being the Poles) and other East European peoples (such as the Romanians and Saxons of Transylvania) as nonhistoric, counter revolutionary by nature and doomed to extinction. The statements, moreover,were saturated with insulting epithets (pig-headed, barbarian,robber) and ominous-sounding threats (a bloody revenge that would annihilate these reactionary peoples). Such sentiments had a particular lynasty ring in the immediate postwar years, in the wake of Nazi brutality in Eastern Europe, and they seemed all the more perverse at a time when Communist parties were taking power in the same East European nations that Engels had written off as counter-revolutionary by their very nature. Exacerbating the ironies and sensitivities was the vehemently anti-Russian animus that permeated these particular passages in Engels' writings, and Russia, of course, had become in the meantime the fatherland of the proletarian revolution.